Deficit panel still far from deal

The congressional supercommittee headed into the 11th hour Tuesday with no deal in sight and growing expectations that it will deadlock despite its broad mandate to right the country’s fiscal ship.

A flurry of meetings from the highest levels of congressional leadership on down to a handful of key negotiators yielded no breakthroughs as of Tuesday evening, and both parties laid the groundwork for a bitter round of fingerpointing.

Story Continued Below

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused the GOP of merely posturing over the issue of raising tax revenues, while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that Democrats put a new offer on the table to move the talks ahead.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), co-chair of the committee, said that talks had moved into a critical phase and that a deal needed to be reached within days in order to win approval from a majority of the committee by the Nov. 23 deadline.

No one said the process was going smoothly.

“What I hoped is that because we have an obligation to do something about the debt, I was hoping that there would be a lot of holding — hand holding and hugs and pats on the back and we’d be headed off to Thanksgiving,” Reid told reporters after a party lunch. “But at this stage, we’ve seen a few arm locks and a few — what do you call it when you put someone’s — you lock somebody around the neck?

“Headlock — that’s what it is.”

Hours earlier, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) met with Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday, marking a new phase in talks to strike a $1.2 trillion deficit deal. Reid later described their conversations over the supercommittee as “non-substantive.”

The talks have long been between the two leaders’ chiefs of staff and top aides, but that Boehner and Reid are meeting shows that serious negotiations have begun about the supercommittee’s end game, with a Nov. 23 deadline looming.

The meeting came the same day that House Republicans got their most detailed rundown on the plans under consideration by the 12-person panel.

It wasn’t a presentation laced with optimism. While publicly, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the committee’s co-chair, has been mum on the prospects of a supercommittee deal, saying he’ll remain hopeful until the last minute, things were a bit different inside the House Republican Conference on Tuesday morning.

The Republican co-chair of the panel described what the supercommittee might produce as being “abject [failure] or a ‘kiss your sister agreement’,” according to several people in a morning meeting in the basement of the Capitol, illustrating dim prospects for a deal.

Later in the day, after exiting a meeting with Republicans, Hensarling said “It’s getting late, but we’re here. Haven’t given up hope, but it’s getting late.” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said the party meeting was to “stay in touch and stay on the same page.”